I don't know how many people have downloaded or purchased Sublime but I'm not 100% convinced it slowed down due to not having recurring revenue.
ST2 has been out for over 6 years and ST1 was initially released 11 years ago (based on the wiki). I have to imagine he made really good money. Possibly even so much that he lost interest after hitting a financial goal.
Back in 2017 MS said more than 2.6 million people use VSCode on a monthly basis. That's not downloads, but monthly users. It could maybe be double that by now (who knows).
But if you're talking about millions of active users, I don't think it's unreasonable to think 3-4 million people used Sublime in its life time -- especially before VSCode existed.
If only 1% of users bought it (40,000 sales) at $70 = $2,800,000 dollars in a business where practically all of that is profit. That doesn't even account for the $30 price to upgrade from ST2 to ST3. Even if he only sold half of that amount, that's still crushing it over a 10 year period of time.
ST2 has been out for over 6 years and ST1 was initially released 11 years ago (based on the wiki). I have to imagine he made really good money. Possibly even so much that he lost interest after hitting a financial goal.
Back in 2017 MS said more than 2.6 million people use VSCode on a monthly basis. That's not downloads, but monthly users. It could maybe be double that by now (who knows).
But if you're talking about millions of active users, I don't think it's unreasonable to think 3-4 million people used Sublime in its life time -- especially before VSCode existed.
If only 1% of users bought it (40,000 sales) at $70 = $2,800,000 dollars in a business where practically all of that is profit. That doesn't even account for the $30 price to upgrade from ST2 to ST3. Even if he only sold half of that amount, that's still crushing it over a 10 year period of time.